Author: Mackenzie

When it comes to advertising, you need to start at the beginning. If you’ve decided you’re going to put up flyers, put out a banner, or run ads on Facebook, the first thing to do is to know your audience. I know, it’s tempting to think the first thing to figure out is “what do you want to say?” What do we want people to know about us? Ok, half the time with Quakers, the answer to that is “we’re not dead yet.” So, that’s not that helpful. And if you just give trivia and facts about Quakers, then...

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” says Peter Drucker. It’s a commonly repeated bit of advice. How can you work on improving newcomer retention if you’re never evaluating retention? Evaluating retention numbers It’s January, so now’s a good time to look back on 2017. Pull out the guest book or your pile of newcomer cards, connection cards, or index cards—whatever you use to collect info from first-timers. Count them up. Go ahead and ignore the ones who filled in the address part with the name of some other meeting or somewhere otherwise non-local. They shouldn’t count against you....

Yesterday, I noticed one of my local meetings lists on their Facebook page a web address like LocalCityFriends.org . One problem: they don’t own the domain. They’re using FGC’s Quaker Cloud these days, and those web addresses are just a bear to recite, but they weren’t redirecting to Quaker Cloud. Redirecting is like setting up a “DETOUR” sign, but on the internet. I sent them an email, letting them know their domain must’ve expired without them noticing. They wrote back that they’d given up the domain because FGC doesn’t offer a redirect service, and they didn’t want to pay for...

This post is likely to make people very uncomfortable. Please bear with me. Let’s think about what happens when we don’t proselytize and why we don’t proselytize. It is extremely common to say “Quakers don’t proselytize.” I don’t know when this idea originated, since the early Friends were extremely evangelistic. (What do you think Fox was doing, interrupting sermons, if not evangelizing? Or Solomon Eccles when he went naked through Smithfield Market? Or Mary Fisher & Elizabeth Williams in Cambridge?) There was a great people to be gathered, after all. A year ago, I encountered a comment on one of Callid...

Trying to decide on what tech to use can easily result in somebody in serious analysis paralysis. Want to skip the research and just be told a working set of tech to use for your meeting? I got your back. TL;DR This is a long post. Don’t feel like reading the whole thing? The tech stack I suggest if you don’t have a compelling reason to do something different is: Website: WordPress; see list of suggested plugins Email announcements: Mailchimp Online giving: Tithe.ly Church management: Breeze, possibly with Planning Center Online for programmed worship Counting people: Church Metrics Website There...